Engineering News

Over the last two days, Cloudflare observed two events that had effects on global Internet traffic levels. Cloudflare handles approximately 10% of all Internet requests, so we have significant visibility into traffic from countries and networks across the world. On Tuesday, September 5th, the government of Togo decided to restrict Internet access in the country following political protests. The government blocked social networks and rate-limited traffic, which had an impact on Cloudflare. This adds Togo to the list of countries…

Sometimes you need more from your API than what you get from the first set of returned results. Welcome to the world of pagination — spreading out results over a number of pages or sections. I’ll provide an overview into some basic pagination concepts, and dive deep into how we do things at Square. Introduction to pagination The concept of pagination originally comes from books, but I think it’s easier to describe in terms of lists. You see pagination all the time on…

Satyaloka This is the abode of Lord Brahma, the progenitor of this material universe. Here, there are some types of air-planes controlled by mantra, not by any mechanical means. The residents have mind and intelligence, but no material gross bodies. They feel compassion for those suffering in the lower regions, but do not suffer from fear, old age, or death. At the time of final dissolution of the material planets, the residents here transform their subtle bodies into spiritual bodies…

Today, we are excited to announce the 1.0 release of the Yarn JavaScript package manager, a major step for the project. In the 11 months since its initial release, Yarn has generated a large following. Currently, there are more than 175,000 projects on GitHub with a yarn.lock file in their root directory. In use by many large and small companies, and across the open source community, Yarn is now responsible for nearly 3 billion package downloads per month. Reduced install…

An array of silver-TPU ink sensors printed on a flexible TPU base. Credit: the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering Human skin must flex and stretch to accommodate the body’s every move. Anything worn tight on the body must also be able to flex around muscles and joints, which helps explain why synthetic fabrics like spandex are popular in active wear. Wearable electronic devices that aim to track and measure the body’s movements must possess similar properties, yet integrating rigid…

The UW researchers initially tested PupilScreen with a 3-D printed box that controls the eye’s exposure to light. They are now training their deep learning algorithms to produce similar results with the smartphone camera alone. Credit: Dennis Wise/University of Washington University of Washington researchers are developing the first smartphone app that is capable of objectively detecting concussion and other traumatic brain injuries in the field: on the sidelines of a sports game, on a battlefield or in the home of…

The capabilities of static analyzers, which catch bugs before programs are run, are steadily improving. During our work on the Infer static analyzer, we often were asked about the differences between Infer and other open source analysis tools like Findbugs, Error-prone, and Clang Static Analyzer. A main difference is inter-procedural bugs, or bugs that involve interactions between multiple procedures. We’ll take a look at two examples of inter-procedural bugs that Infer found in Java and C — one from the…

This is an expanded version of my talk at NginxConf 2017 on September 6, 2017. As an SRE on the Dropbox Traffic Team, I’m responsible for our Edge network: its reliability, performance, and efficiency. The Dropbox edge network is an nginx-based proxy tier designed to handle both latency-sensitive metadata transactions and high-throughput data transfers. In a system that is handling tens of gigabits per second while simultaneously processing tens of thousands latency-sensitive transactions there are efficiency/performance optimizations throughout the proxy…

Accurate time series forecasting during high variance segments (e.g., holidays and sporting events) is critical for anomaly detection, resource allocation, budget planning, and other related tasks necessary to facilitate optimal Uber user experiences at scale. Forecasting these variables, however, can be challenging because extreme event prediction depends on weather, city population growth, and other external factors that contribute to forecast uncertainty. In recent years, the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) technique has become a popular time series modeling framework due…

TOGAF which stands for The Open Group Architecture Framework, is a sophisticated and advanced approach towards the framework which is used by an enterprise to plan, strategize, implement and handle its Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise architecture can be majorly divided into different domains, namely data, technology, application, and business. It is mostly dependent on existing, consistent products and improving technologies. The TOGAF certification program is mostly opted by developers, designers or technical leads to become a successful architect. Architects take the…